On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Hans Werner <HWerner4 at gmx.de> wrote:
>> ... and yes, many people understand you.
>> :) Thanks to everyone who replied so far. I am glad people care about this.
>>> > We know all about the "coding in your free time" and we can only have
>> > the highest respect for that, but the drivers are completely abandonded,
>> > and that's how we feel, too.
>>>> No, and that's my HVR4000 code you're talking about (and the good work
>> of Darron Broad, which was then picked up by Igor). The driver is
>> marginalized, it's not abandoned.
>> I hope your and Darron's drivers (http://dev.kewl.org/hauppauge) are not seen as
> marginalized. The multifrontend (MFE) patch by you and Darron is the driver that I
> actually *use* for watching TV. It works nicely with Kaffeine without modification. And I,
> for one, appreciate your sane approach and the simplicity of the techniques you used to
> add DVB-S2 support (using sysctls for the SFE driver, and wrapping two ioctls to pull in
> extra parameters for the MFE driver). If the kernel API is changed sensibly it should be
> easy and quick to adapt your drivers to fit in.
>>> The HVR4000 situation is under review, the wheels are slowly turning....
> If you are able to say anything about that I would be very interested.
>> Now, to show how simple I think all this could be, here is a PATCH implementing what
> I think is the *minimal* API required to support DVB-S2.
>> Notes:
>> * same API structure, I just added some new enums and variables, nothing removed
> * no changes required to any existing drivers (v4l-dvb still compiles)
> * no changes required to existing applications (just need to be recompiled)
> * no drivers, but I think the HVR4000 MFE patch could be easily adapted
>> I added the fe_caps2 enum because we're running out of bits in the capabilities bitfield.
> More elegant would be to have separate bitfields for FEC capabilities and modulation
> capabilities but that would require (easy) changes to (a lot of) drivers and applications.
>> Why should we not merge something simple like this immediately? This could have been done
> years ago. If it takes several rounds of API upgrades to reach all the feature people want then
> so be it, but a long journey begins with one step.
This will break binary compatibility with existing apps. You're right
-- those apps will work with a recompile, but I believe that as a
whole, the linux-dvb kernel and userspace developers alike are looking
to avoid breaking binary compatibility.
Regards,
Mike